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Show HN: Deskulu – Opensource knowledgebase and ticketing system

137 points by farhadhf 10y ago

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Any reason this shouldn't have straight up SMTP support built in? Was looking at an internal use for this right up until I noticed that requirement.
- farhadhf 10y ago
  Simply because we were using Mandrill at the time of writing this. It's easy to add more methods like SMTP/SendGrid/etc to it though.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mahdiponline 10y ago
Awesome. Thank you.
sarreph 10y ago
Great work! With such high per-agent pricing tiers on mainstream platforms such as osTicket and ZenDesk, this looks like a great alternative for startups and small teams :)
xxdesmus 10y ago
You lost me at: "Deskulu is an opensource helpdesk and ticketing system based on Drupal 7..."
- farhadhf 10y ago
  I know Drupal is not the best or simplest thing for doing this out there. It's not even that good in terms of performance. But it's flexible and extremely fast when it comes to development time. Deskulu was not supposed to be scalable (it's not going to be Zendesk). I built the first version this over a weekend to handle our own tickets and then it's just been doing bug fixes/updates every now and then. It would've been impossible to do it in such short time with anything else (at least for me), and it's saved us hundreds of dollars over the past months. I'd call that a win.
  - the_ancient 10y ago
    Yes but it is not written in nodejs/rust/<insert lang of the moment> so clearly it is crap /s
reitanqild 10y ago
Nice work and thanks for sharing! And don't care about the PHP haters here. For those who wants to go with hosted anyway, I'd recommend looking into Freshdesk instead of Zendesk. Some reasons: * Free tier up to three users * Cheaper licenses once you leave the free tier. (IIRC) * More features included by default in the free and lowest tiers. (IIRC) Just be aware that a friendly Indian (or so I think) will call to try to upsell you : )
- darkvertex 10y ago
  We use Freshdesk's "FreshService" ticket system at my workplace and the way it handles replies in one ticket from non-agents is absolute garbage. You make a ticket by email, it adds to the system, a support agent is assigned to it, so far so good... then a developer with access to see the ticket goes to the ticket page and adds a helpful reply, except the ticket creator never hears about it. It's registered on the ticket web UI, but the creator of the ticket is ONLY notified of the responses by the support agent only. This sucks big time (and AFAIK is not configurable.) Also god forbid someone uses email (or an email alias you're part of) to make the ticket and you accidentally do Reply All so your reply creates a brand new ticket just for you as opposed to appearing as a response in the initial ticket. It's so dumb. (You can get a ticket ID to put in a brand new email and then your reply would be registered but you need to know the ticket number first AND it still suffers the same issue that if you are not the support agent your reply is registered but never notified to the ticket creator.) If your support is always 1-to-1 then by all means Freshservice is fine, though.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Ok, that's good feedback! I haven't used it wnough to notice. Thanks a lot.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    They should make it crystal clear that it doesn't send to the customer. That is garbage. But it makes sense if you think about it since you're likely paying per-agent. They don't want other users to workaround the licensing and act as agents since that's how they make money.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
codegeek 10y ago
"Need a Mandrill account" You may want to rethink this one as Mandrill screwed their customers big time recently. So I hope there is a way to add other services like sendgrid, mailgun etc.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Or, your organizations own email server....
  - pbreit 10y ago
    Running you're own mail server is not a good idea if you hope to avoid ending up in spam folders.
- mfkp 10y ago
  I second this, I recently switched my apps off of Mandrill because of their changes. I assume the authors didn't want to deal with the different "incoming webhooks" from different services, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement in theory. For reference, here's a list of SMTP providers which support inbound email: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/#summary https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s...
  - hobofan 10y ago
    Does anyone know if they are trying to kill off Mandrill? Shortly after they closed down the Mandrill login they closed down our account for a TOS violation without warning. Outbound emails immediately stopped sending and we had to switch to Sendgrid ASAP. Their support didn't cave one bit and it seemed like they were actively trying to lose us as customers.
    - 1123581321 10y ago
      Can you share what you were doing, and what they thought you were doing? Do you also use Mailchimp to send marketing emails?
behnamakradi 10y ago
Good
cyphar 10y ago
+1 for GPLv2. Would you consider making it "GPLv2 or later", as well as including the three-paragraph statement of the license in all of the source files?
SwellJoe 10y ago
Our current ticket tracker is Project Issue (the same one used by Drupal.org, sort of, though they seem to still be running a custom version). I dislike it a lot, and it was a tremendous pain in the ass to migrate from the Drupal 6 version to the Drupal 7 version. I'm hesitant to invest any more time in Drupal-based solutions to things because of how painful our D6 to D7 migration has been and how buggy and incomplete almost every module we use has been. (And, with most developers now focusing on Drupal 8, I don't expect any of these problems to ever get fixed in Drupal 7.) But, this looks really nice, and since I'm stuck with Drupal for the foreseeable future (I can't afford to stop everything to do another migration at this point), I will likely look into how difficult migrating our tickets from Project Issue would be. I don't suppose there's already a migration for that? Also, using a third party for notifications as you're doing is problematic; probably even a deal breaker, for us. Though, I understand the desire to not use Drupal notifications, as they're among the most broken parts of the system and have a clumsy API and very weak solutions to common things like bounce processing and mailed replies. Finally, I'm super impressed by how fast some experienced Drupal folks can whip something up. I struggle for days or weeks to do anything with it. It's such a large system, and it always seems to take so much code to do even basic stuff (and forms API in Drupal is deeply ugly and verbose). That's my roundabout away of congratulating you for making something awesome in a very short amount of time. Edit: You mention forums as a feature of this. Is that the standard Drupal forum module or something else?

137 points by farhadhf 10y ago

Any reason this shouldn't have straight up SMTP support built in? Was looking at an internal use for this right up until I noticed that requirement.

farhadhf 10y ago
Simply because we were using Mandrill at the time of writing this. It's easy to add more methods like SMTP/SendGrid/etc to it though.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mahdiponline 10y ago

Awesome. Thank you.

sarreph 10y ago

Great work! With such high per-agent pricing tiers on mainstream platforms such as osTicket and ZenDesk, this looks like a great alternative for startups and small teams :)

xxdesmus 10y ago

You lost me at: "Deskulu is an opensource helpdesk and ticketing system based on Drupal 7..."

farhadhf 10y ago
I know Drupal is not the best or simplest thing for doing this out there. It's not even that good in terms of performance. But it's flexible and extremely fast when it comes to development time. Deskulu was not supposed to be scalable (it's not going to be Zendesk). I built the first version this over a weekend to handle our own tickets and then it's just been doing bug fixes/updates every now and then. It would've been impossible to do it in such short time with anything else (at least for me), and it's saved us hundreds of dollars over the past months. I'd call that a win.
- the_ancient 10y ago
  Yes but it is not written in nodejs/rust/<insert lang of the moment> so clearly it is crap /s

reitanqild 10y ago

Nice work and thanks for sharing! And don't care about the PHP haters here. For those who wants to go with hosted anyway, I'd recommend looking into Freshdesk instead of Zendesk. Some reasons: * Free tier up to three users * Cheaper licenses once you leave the free tier. (IIRC) * More features included by default in the free and lowest tiers. (IIRC) Just be aware that a friendly Indian (or so I think) will call to try to upsell you : )

darkvertex 10y ago
We use Freshdesk's "FreshService" ticket system at my workplace and the way it handles replies in one ticket from non-agents is absolute garbage. You make a ticket by email, it adds to the system, a support agent is assigned to it, so far so good... then a developer with access to see the ticket goes to the ticket page and adds a helpful reply, except the ticket creator never hears about it. It's registered on the ticket web UI, but the creator of the ticket is ONLY notified of the responses by the support agent only. This sucks big time (and AFAIK is not configurable.) Also god forbid someone uses email (or an email alias you're part of) to make the ticket and you accidentally do Reply All so your reply creates a brand new ticket just for you as opposed to appearing as a response in the initial ticket. It's so dumb. (You can get a ticket ID to put in a brand new email and then your reply would be registered but you need to know the ticket number first AND it still suffers the same issue that if you are not the support agent your reply is registered but never notified to the ticket creator.) If your support is always 1-to-1 then by all means Freshservice is fine, though.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Ok, that's good feedback! I haven't used it wnough to notice. Thanks a lot.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  They should make it crystal clear that it doesn't send to the customer. That is garbage. But it makes sense if you think about it since you're likely paying per-agent. They don't want other users to workaround the licensing and act as agents since that's how they make money.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

codegeek 10y ago

"Need a Mandrill account" You may want to rethink this one as Mandrill screwed their customers big time recently. So I hope there is a way to add other services like sendgrid, mailgun etc.

ams6110 10y ago
Or, your organizations own email server....
- pbreit 10y ago
  Running you're own mail server is not a good idea if you hope to avoid ending up in spam folders.
mfkp 10y ago
I second this, I recently switched my apps off of Mandrill because of their changes. I assume the authors didn't want to deal with the different "incoming webhooks" from different services, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement in theory. For reference, here's a list of SMTP providers which support inbound email: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/#summary https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s...
- hobofan 10y ago
  Does anyone know if they are trying to kill off Mandrill? Shortly after they closed down the Mandrill login they closed down our account for a TOS violation without warning. Outbound emails immediately stopped sending and we had to switch to Sendgrid ASAP. Their support didn't cave one bit and it seemed like they were actively trying to lose us as customers.
  - 1123581321 10y ago
    Can you share what you were doing, and what they thought you were doing? Do you also use Mailchimp to send marketing emails?

behnamakradi 10y ago

Good

cyphar 10y ago

+1 for GPLv2. Would you consider making it "GPLv2 or later", as well as including the three-paragraph statement of the license in all of the source files?

SwellJoe 10y ago

Our current ticket tracker is Project Issue (the same one used by Drupal.org, sort of, though they seem to still be running a custom version). I dislike it a lot, and it was a tremendous pain in the ass to migrate from the Drupal 6 version to the Drupal 7 version. I'm hesitant to invest any more time in Drupal-based solutions to things because of how painful our D6 to D7 migration has been and how buggy and incomplete almost every module we use has been. (And, with most developers now focusing on Drupal 8, I don't expect any of these problems to ever get fixed in Drupal 7.) But, this looks really nice, and since I'm stuck with Drupal for the foreseeable future (I can't afford to stop everything to do another migration at this point), I will likely look into how difficult migrating our tickets from Project Issue would be. I don't suppose there's already a migration for that? Also, using a third party for notifications as you're doing is problematic; probably even a deal breaker, for us. Though, I understand the desire to not use Drupal notifications, as they're among the most broken parts of the system and have a clumsy API and very weak solutions to common things like bounce processing and mailed replies. Finally, I'm super impressed by how fast some experienced Drupal folks can whip something up. I struggle for days or weeks to do anything with it. It's such a large system, and it always seems to take so much code to do even basic stuff (and forms API in Drupal is deeply ugly and verbose). That's my roundabout away of congratulating you for making something awesome in a very short amount of time. Edit: You mention forums as a feature of this. Is that the standard Drupal forum module or something else?